Urs Hölzle (German pronunciation: [ˈʊrs ˈhœltslɛ]) is a Swiss software engineer and technology executive. He is the senior vice president of technical infrastructure and Google Fellow at Google. As Google’s eighth employee and its first VP of Engineering, he has shaped much of Google’s development processes and infrastructure

He led the design of Google’s very efficient data centers which are said to use less than half the power of a conventional data center.[3] In 2014 he received The Economist’s Innovation Award for his datacenter efficiency work.[4] With Luiz Barroso, he wrote The Datacenter as a Computer: An Introduction to the Design of Warehouse-Scale Machines.[5] In June 2007, he introduced the Climate Savers Computing Initiative together with Pat Gelsinger which aims to halve the power consumption of desktop computers and servers.

Also in 2007, he and Luiz Barroso wrote “The Case for Energy Proportional Computing” which argued that servers should be designed to use power in proportion to their current load, because they spend much of their time being only partially loaded. This paper is often credited for spurring CPU manufacturers to make their designs much more energy efficient.[6] Today, energy proportional computing has become a standard goal for both server and mobile uses.

In 2012, Hölzle introduced “the G-Scale Network” on which Google had begun managing its petabyte-scale internal data flow via OpenFlow, an open source software system jointly devised by scientists at Stanford and the UC Berkeley and promoted by the Open Networking Foundation. The internal data flow, or network, is distinct from the one that connects users to Google services (Search, Gmail, YouTube, etc.). In the process of describing the new network, Hölzle also confirmed more about Google’s making of its own networking equipment like routers and switches for G-Scale; and said the company wanted, by being open about the changes, to “encourage the industry — hardware, software and ISP’s — to look down this path and say, ‘I can benefit from this.'” He said network utilization was nearing 100% of capacity, a dramatic efficiency improvement.[8]

He won his 2014 academy award for work in colour perception, as applied to computer graphics, described in his 1997 PhD thesis.[1][3]He told CTV News he hadn’t done any work in computer graphics for 15 years. Veach had worked at Pixar, but, more recently, he had been a senior developer at Google.[2]

Veach is a strong believer in environmental causes and served as the vice-chair of the Rainforest Trust.[4]

Farhad Manjoo named Veach and two of his non-American colleagues, at Google, in an article entitled, “Why Silicon Valley Wouldn’t Work Without Immigrants”.[5] Manjoo’s article attempted to explain why newly inaugurated President Donald Trump‘s attempts to squeeze off the flow of immigrants to the USA was dangerous. He argued that America disproportionately benefitted from allowing big brained foreigners like Veach to find work.